As his firm's chief technology officer, Don Rippert wields a stubborn confidence when it comes to reading the technology world's tea leaves. And at no time is that confidence more stubborn than when he is discussing the likely impact of services-oriented architectures (SOA) on the consulting business. For while certain consultants may fear SOA's impact on their billable hours, Rippert views SOA as a unique key to unlock new business: "I think that we're going to grow much more quickly in the SOA world, and we're going to have much more demand." When asked how SOA will likely impact the number of man-hours required to deploy IT applications, Rippert says: "I think that qualitatively SOA will be the biggest reduction in 26 years." Twenty-six years … a period that likely holds deep meaning for Rippert, who this August begins his 26th year with Accenture.
In measuring his personal milestones, Rippert doesn't talk about new job titles or closing megadeals. Instead, he offers a few details about a number of assignments he undertook in the early part of his career, in the 1980s. One "key" milestone he recalls was a custom development assignment for a number of government entities that involved what was known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF), an IBM program that at the time was supported by assembly language applications.
"We did all the development in assembly language, and you had to write your own database. You couldn't write a program with more than 4k of object code, and you had to fork out the links from program to program," Rippert says, as he morphs back into "the assembly language guy" he once was. "Its one claim to fame was that it was absolutely blisteringly fast," he adds, not being able to resist savoring work that at one time was considered cutting-edge. "It was often a trail of tears to get those things to work, but we did get them to work, and this put me in a position to be seen as a technology guy within what was then Andersen Consulting."
While Rippert cites the 1980s as the truly formative years of his technology career, the period also appears to have given him some insight into what now may lie ahead for SOA.
Seeking to provide an example of a technology adoption that SOA could potentially mirror, Rippert says: "One of the most significant examples would be structured query language, which enabled the use of relational databases in the mid-'80s." Once again, it appears that the more Rippert looks back, the more he sees ahead.
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